THE CLASH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Police And Thieves

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-60, 63-108 and 111-150 -- 79.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
77 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
178
LENGTH
9:15
DIFFICULTY
28/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 77 BPM
POLICE AND THIEVES · BAR 5

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 9 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 28 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 58 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 58, 67 and 77 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.

PRACTISE THIS BEAT →

Questions

What drum beat does Police And Thieves use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 77 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 79.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-60, 63-108 and 111-150. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Police And Thieves hard?

9 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 28 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 178 BARS ANALYSED